Engineered Resilient Systems: A DoD Perspective

Department of Defense (DoD) systems are required to be trusted and effective in a wide range of operational contexts with the ability to respond to new or changing conditions through modified tactics, appropriate reconfiguration, or replacement. As importantly, these systems are required to exhibit predictable and graceful degradation outside their designed performance envelope. For these systems to be included in the force structure, they need to be manufacturable, readily deployable, sustainable, easily modifiable, and cost-effective. Collectively, these requirements inform the definition of resilient DoD systems. This paper explores the properties and tradeoffs for engineered resilient systems in the military context. It reviews various perspectives on resilience, overlays DoD requirements on these perspectives, and presents DoD challenges in realizing and rapidly fielding resilient systems. This paper also presents promising research themes that need to be pursued by the research community to help the DoD realize the vision of affordable, adaptable, and effective systems. This paper concludes with a discussion of specific DoD systems that can potentially benefit from resilience and stresses the need for sustaining a community of interest in this important area. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the University of Southern California.